Berlin, berlin, berlin…..the weekend that may never really be completely spoken of. I will say though that it was possibly one of the most epic and fun weekends of my entire life and I wish like crazy that I would have had like another week or two there. It is by far my favorite German city. We left on Friday night and had to take a taxi into downtown. There were like strikes on all of the regional trains for some reason, and so there were major issues getting downtown. And although those issues were resolved midday, there were still no U bahn trains running until the next morning. LAME! How can train people go on strike? That seems like wrong. Soooo many people here depend on the trains. Its like the metro is in new York. Just not able to get by without it. I’m wondering how many people had to like miss work and stuff because of it. Insane. I guess the issue was resolved by giving the train workers like a raise and 30 more vacation days. 30 more days????? What the heck. That seems so incredibly wrong. I mean that is an entire month extra. Germans already have all sorts of crazy holidays all of the time. Like sooo many. At least like four or five a month. I have no idea how this country is so productive. Although I guess I too might be more motivated in life if I had more days off to look forward to lol. Ok. So anyways, we took a taxi downtown with my group of five and then one of the new girls that camp had brought in. Oddly enough, she was telling us about how in Interlaken, Sam had gotten one of her best friends sent home. I can’t believe that the story he told us was true. He told us all about how he had saved some girl in Interlaken who had been like stalked by some guy. We had all thought that he just made it up to scare us, but it was real. Except completely exaggerated. Nothing was actually wrong, the girl wasn’t even really drunk, Sam just thought the guy she was dancing with was creepy and approached her about it. He then called her PC and our project director Kacey. So lame. I guess it was her mistake though for introducing herself as camp adventure to the PC she recognized from Iowa. Dumb dumb. Always deny deny deny…. Lol. Ok so we get downtown and find out our 11:05 train should still be working fine since it was a fast train. RJ66. Like rail jet or something like that. And anyways, We get this together and go shopping in a market for some stuff to take with us on the train. At like 9:55, we go up to the station and look for our gate. Oh awesome, the train is delayed by thirty minutes. How is that possible! We are going to miss our connection in Mannheim and not be on the night train to berlin! We were so upset, because we were at the station in time to catch the 9:50 train that had just left, we just didn’t know that we had needed to take it! So we run down to the office that is about to close, and we find out that there is not another train that could get us there leaving from Mannheim until three that morning and there would be three changes instead of a direct train that we could sleep on. BOO! So we were so pissed. Then we find out that Molly and Briggette, two people from our group, had taken the earlier train and not told anyone else! They had our reservations for the night train, what were we supposed to do! Why wouldn’t they tell us. Not happy at all, and we were like freaking out. So We each drank a mini bottle of champagne and started praying that the train was going to be on time or that our connecting train would also be delayed. We finally make it to Mannheim like half an hour after our train was supposed to have left, and there it was just sitting there! Joy af all joys! They had waited because so many people on the connection had reservations for that train! Hallelujiah! We were able to make it to our seats after running across the platform and sit down just as it was about to leave. Sigh of relief and I actually got a pretty good night sleep. Except for these two stupid boys who were just like making tons of noise and not caring about anyone else. They were so annoying and all of the like German people were telling them to shut up. So finally, peace and sleep. The next morning, we made it to Berlin at like 8am about, and we changed into clothes for the day and ate breakfast at the McDonalds. (and what we had packed). Then we headed off to see some of the sites in Berlin before checking into the hostel to get ready for beerfest and the night. Molly Briggette, and Rebecca had already been to berlin, so they didn’t want to see the same stuff as some of us. Mary Beth, Bre, Leah, and I ended up traveling together that day and it was for sure a complete blast. I can’t even say how much fun I had. We walked to all of the important buildings, like the bridge, this arch thing, and other great buildings. We saw the memorial of people who died in the war, and went to a german history museum. The german history museum was absolutely amazing. It had the history of Germany from like 100 ad to like present. By far the coolest stuff was the stuff about knights and castles with all of the armor displays, and all of the WWII stuff. SO much stuff, it was incredible. One of my favorite museums I’ve ever been to. Then we went and saw checkpoint Charlie, which is the point at which my camera died. We were going to try and go see the wall at this point, but we decided to do it the next day when there would be more time, and then we could go drop all of our stuff off at the hostel so that we could change and feel not so sweaty and gross. It was SOOOO much hotter that weekend than we all thought it was going to be. I like can’t belive how hot it was. We were all dripping sweat and in jeans and stuff. Bleh. When we got to the hostel and checked in, we all took off most of our clothes, opened the windows, and napped for like an hour. It was much needed. Then when we woke up we got ready to go out for the day. I dressed in my new shorts and a black shirt. Leah and Bre wore awesome dresses. And so did Mary beth! She doesn’t usually dress up, but we convinced her to wear a dress and do her hair. It was so great! She looked amazing. Then we met up with Briggette, Molly, and Rebecca to go to beerfest! The train ride there was ridiculous. It was so hot on the trains. I was like, if we don’t get off, I’m going to break these windows open! We were literally dripping sweat. It was insane. But when we finally got there, it was absolutely amazing! There was an entire alley called karl Marx Alley that was like massive, and the entire thing was one huge long outdoor beer thing. There were hundreds of breweries who set up outdoor beer booths and stuff. There were hundreds of thousands of people. So crazy. Hundreds of tables. We were like, wow. That’s amazing. Then…. Fricken Molly and Briggette started trying to find two of their friends who I had met at directors training. Their names were like Trevor and Jamie or something like that. I thought he was gay and she was a lesbian, but turns out that they are dating. Huh. I guess there is someone out there for everyone. Except for me yet. But someday! But when Molly and Briggette were trying to find them, they were being soooo horrible. They like were dragging us along with them when we just wanted to stop and get to know people and have fun. They were like, “and…we’re walking.” “one two three eyes on me.” Really? Are we children? I was sooo upset. Everyone was. The worst was that when we met up with their stupid friends, they were like apologizing for our behavior, and we weren’t even being crazy! Molly was like, “ I’m sorry. They aren’t usually like this….” What the hell. Absolutely ridiculous. So we left them. Finally! And then we just had a blast. Everything was great! We met tons of awesome people, took pictures with guys in lederhosen, drank a little, walked around a lot and talked. Then after hours had passed by, we went to an absinthe bar and tried that. Probably not the best idea. I had a drink of one that was like 80 % and it was bad news bears. It smelled like black licorice, but it was soooo incredibly strong, it literally burned the entire way down. Ah! I had to call it a night after that, even though I was sad I didn’t get to go dancing. Mary Beth and I took back the trains, and got there around like midnight. Full eight hours of sleep for me, yay! Woot woot! It was great. I woke up the next morning feeling amazing! Sadly, for the others, they didn’t get in until like six in the morning and they only got like two hours of sleep. We got up the next morning to go see the berlin wall before we went to beerfest to be part of the longest beer table. The Berlin wall was absolutely amazing. We went to the East Side Gallery. It had like different murals by different people and stuff. I thought it was great that it was painted like this, and a lot of them had like great messages. After that, we went to beerfest and got our stuff together for our table at beerfest! They were going for the world record of like the longest beergarden in the world. We reserved a spot a while ago, and so did another group. For some reason, Noheley was the only person who did not end up on the reservation. So we were like, don’t tell Molly and Briggette, but you five take that reservation, and then the four of us will take the other reservation. We didn’t even want to deal with meeting up with them and stuff. So lame. Ok. So we found our brewery and showed them our reservation, and then we were able to get our free beer, with the free mug, and then a free gift from the brewery. We got these like little tea light candle things. Pretty awesome. I wore my drindle, which is like the traditional german dress. It was awesome. I took a picture with these old guys who were dressed in like what I would think of as colonial wear, but it couldn’t be because Germany didn’t have colonies. Lol. All was a great success, I loved berlin, and will definitely always remember it. For forever and ever and ever.
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